Client Story

The Walid family, from China, came to a Just Neighbors community clinic back in May.  The family is Uyghur, an ethnic group living throughout Asia that has long been persecuted.  (Coincidentally, the volunteer conducting the intake for us was from Mongolia, a nation which also has a significant Uyghur population).  Mr. Walid fled China as an asylee nearly five years ago and received asylum in the United States. 

Client Story

The Portillo family came to Just Neighbors in 2005 for help.  For many years the mother and three children had been severely beaten by the husband (the children's father).  The abuse started at the beginning of the marriage and continued in Mrs. Portillo's home country, despite her efforts to have her husband arrested by the police.  After many years of abuse, the family came to the U.S. to escape only to find a few months later that the husband/father had followed them here. 

Just Neighbors conducts two community clinics each month, meeting with 4-10 new clients each time with the help of many volunteers.  The following four vignettes represent intakes that took place at our October clinics.  They demonstrate the breadth of cases we get, the unpredictable nature of the cases, and the reliance we have on volunteers to complete the intakes.

Sometimes It's Better to Wait

Based on information from the telephone intake that could not possibly cover a complicated situation, we had anticipated not being able to provide an immigration benefit to the young woman from Liberia; but we were pleasantly surprised!  Now in her early twenties, she had entered the United States as a teenager and as an asylee.